Saturday, April 12, 2014

It must have seemed natural to the editors of the London
Review to ask Thomas Nagel, the author of The View from Nowhere, to review R.
Jay Wallace’s The View from Here. The subtitle of Wallace’s book is On
affirmation, attachment and the limits of regret, and from the account that
Nagel gives of the book, it seems to be a book that does justice to its themes,
which are at the intersection of philosophy and literature. It is a meaty
subject, this of taking up the moral peculiarity of the line of fate of
individuals and nations, and the way these lines are a mixture of the good and
the atrocious. Wallace seems to think that it isn’t as though the atrocity
could be subtracted from the good, but that they are dialectically interlocked.
I happen to share that view. I was raised by white parents in the suburbs in
the South in the 60s, when apartheid was beginning to crack, and I have
long realized that these facts in the
background – both the apartheid that made enormous room for white people like
my folks in the post-war years and the crumbling of apartheid that allowed
Northern businesses to move into the south as it became a more normal part of
the country – benefited me. So if I retrospectively affirm my life, I am
confronted with the problem of what to do about these things, which I don’t
want to affirm. Do I opt for
self-condemnation, or do I apologize for Jim Crow?

In a sense (not to be too grand about it), this is the kind
of problem faced by Leibniz’s God. On the one hand, his perfection requires
that he affirm himself perfectly, but on the other hand, the creation is full
of atrocities, and the devil is abroad. To understand how to bridge this moral
conundrum, Leibniz revamped the metaphysical discourse on possibility that had
been built by the ancients and the medievals. He thought, in other word, that
the greatest possible good was built into every appearance of evil, the
paradigm case being, of course, the exercise of free will.

For this, he was satirized by Voltaire, who began his career
on the side of a certain enlightenment view that claimed that atrocity and
virtue could be radically separated, given the right social machinery, and who
endit it deciding that, as nature itself was indifferent to human values and
civilization was generally systematized brutality, interspersed with a few
minuets, virtue, as a social thing, was a sham. In other words, the movement
was between believing that we could build a world in which we regret nothing to
believing that we could only build, if we were fortunate, tiny nests in which
regret was held at bay – otherwise, history was a wash.

It is a little astonishing to me that Nagel’s review of
Wallace’s book is written in the spirit of Dr. Pangloss, the character in
Candide forever associated with the phrase ‘all is for the best in the best of
all possible worlds.’ It is important not to take this phrase too bluntly – it is
not, even for Pangloss, true that all is the best, but merely that all serves
the best, all is for it. Voltaire’s
satire did not wholly miss Leibniz’s point. To think that all is the best is to
turn Pangloss into Babbit, the American booster. Nagel’s review alternates
between Pangloss and Babbitry. He refuses to enter into the ‘view from regret’,
treating it as an inducement to suicide rather than to reflection. In the
spirit of the analytic philosopher, he treats dialectic as an undergraduate
logical mistake. And so the interlocked nature of good and atrocity is
something he doesn’t even attempt to refute.

Thus, when Wallace writes that his own place of work, the
University of California at Berkeley, has benefited (and been complicit in)
atrocity, asking whether, in reflecting about his own life, he should regret
the existence of the institution, Nagel contradicts him in tones that
remind me of the owner of a used carlot bawling
at a new hire has conceded some fault to
a potential buyer:

“Wallace teaches at Berkely, a public institution that makes
enormous contributions to knowledge, both theoretical and practical, which
benefit not only its members but the society of which it is a part and the
world as a whole. To doubt that such institutions would exist in a just world
seems to me pathologically pessimistic.”

The babbitry here was, to me, startling. “Society” and “world”
are used as though these were not deeply divided entities, but wholes perfectly
represented by the successful. It would have interested me what Nagel would
have said if Wallace worked at, say, Duke. Would he celebrate Duke medical
schools advances in the treatment of cancer, while explaining that this more
than makes up for the cancers that were caused by the tobacco fortune upon which
the school was founded? Sans doute. If I were to classify Nagel’s response to
Wallace, it would be to call it a case of pathological optimism typical of the
winners in the neo-liberal world.

Regret, I’d argue, is a politically charged mood, as well as
an existential one.

I haven’t resolved the political consequences of the view
from regret myself, and doubt I ever will, but I do see regret as an
irreplaceable tool to understand how we got to where we are – how our histories
unfolded. Without regret, history is dumb.

Friday, April 11, 2014

I grew up in a folksinging family. Consequently, my idea of
the hobo was very romantic – he was an IWW angel. Big Rock Candy Mountain
sounded like a lot more pleasant utopia than the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat – and it still does. In folk songs, he was always a canny step
ahead of the bulls, all in order to be free.

However, I’ve noticed something about hobos in the last
decade or so: there’s been a political sea change. When you see a bum with a
political sign, it is invariably Limbaughdian. I saw, for instance, a man with
a white beard a couple of hours ago, with two signs, one the usually begging
one (“Help me I’m hungry” or something like that) and the other one, on poster
board, a long denunciation of Obama for bringing Naziism to the United States.
Santa Monica is, I think, progressive territory, or it once was, which is why
the city council is still fairly liberal about letting street people be. I’d be
surprised if Obama didn’t rule here during the last elections. Thus, the sign
was not a means of sucking up to a potential audience – and besides, the
handwriting was too angry for that explanation to float.

He reminded me of a beggar I used to run into in Tarrytown
in Austin – another Democratic Party stronghold – whose signs routinely
denounced Democrats for being traitors, simps, underminers of our ways, etc.

Now, there is a myth among liberal academics that the
uneducated white guy is a strong supporter of the worst Republicans – but in
fact, stats show, pretty consistently, that the more educated you are, the more
likely you will vote Republican. Here, simple economic interest seems to
explain the pattern. College graduates, with their higher salaries, are more
inclined to vote for the party that will keep their taxes down. Of course,
there are exceptions in this group, and the Third Party Dems have seen in the
social liberalism of this group an ace way of stealing a march on the GOP –
adopt GOP economic policies and combine them with social liberalism. But that
strategy acknowledges the lifestyle interest of the desired constituency.

In the case of the hobo block (and it is probably not a
block that goes to the polls), it is hard to see the cultural or economic
interest in denouncing the party representing the “handout”. After all, the man
with the beard and my friend from Tarrytown are directly demanding a handout!
One would think the more handouts the better. This was, in fact, Norman Mailer’s
strategy when he ran for Mayor of New York – he actually recruited angry
homeless people because these were the people he wanted to appeal to. Norman
Mailer was one of a kind.

But that was a long time ago, when the Big Rock Candy
Mountain still distantly glimmered. It saddens me that it seems to have gone
into permanent decline. The man with the white beard is surely old enough to
have been a “child of God/walking along the road” of Joanie’s song – but somewhere
along the journey, he absorbed the politics of Ronald Reagan. It is as though the anti-state views of the
old IWW – in which the state and corporation were identified as one monster –
have been transformed into simple anti-state views, in which the state is bad
cause it keeps down the hardworking billionaire.

This makes me think that American politics are even more
hopeless than I already think them. Wow.

Wednesday, April 09, 2014

I ponder sometimes the fact that Adam, this complex being whose proto-language is so sweet to my ear, whose tricks I laugh at, whose humors I deal with, whose steps I marvel at, will forget all of this. We all emerge from amnesia - it is as if we awaken speaking, walking, eating properly and excreting privately, as though these were things we'd always done. Of course, we have stray memories of what went before, motes of dust in the mind's eye - an image of the shoestring we puzzled over, the feeling of crusty snow on the cheek, a confused vision of trailing down a dark hall. But these memories form no collective whole, no sense of our existence.There are many theories about the human origin of belief in the gods; I wonder if anyone has traced the line between belief in an agent with supernatural powers and the natural history of our awakening with powers that we cannot account for?An awakening that leaves such a large mark on our subsequent life that it is too large to remember - large enough that we can only venerate it.

Tuesday, April 08, 2014

I’ve been reading the Magic Mountain for much longer than
the seven years it took Hans Castorp to climb it and climb down from it. Way
back in high school I even finished it – in the now discredited Lowe-Porter
translation. I picked it up because I read a high recommendation in a book by
the wonderful Will and Ariel Durant, blessed be their names. They were members
of the socialist humanism generation of American intellectuals, and their
middle brow guides to Western culture were and still are excellent things for
high school students, to be supplemented of course by the vast trove of lit and
art that we know now was produced by the oppressed – the Atlantic culture of
the African diaspora, women, gays, all those edged aside. Although I no longer
remember what the couple wrote about Mann, I do remember the experience of
reading it. I was sitting in a pew in the Clarkston Baptist church. No doubt it
was another Sunday of Reverend Vincent’s endless non-sequitor sermons – the man
lacked the charisma of an old piece of gun, so his revivalism had a tendency to
fall stillborn on our dead ears. I owe him, though – my first reviews were of
his sermons, which I would feistily attack coming home from church in the car with
Mom. Ah, the budding critic!

Although at the time I thought I was much more than a
budding thumbs up thumbs down man – I felt that I was Clarkston’s sole
modernist. In fact, the single person in the damn suburb who knew what the word
meant!

Under the Durants tutelage, then, I cracked the book. What I
remember is feeling that there was something about the book that made me feel
sickly. Then I went on with my reading list, and as the years passed, I learned
to look down on T.M. I learned he was hooffooted, pendantic, full of hot air,
pseudo-profound. That in fact he was an anti-modernist. I don’t exactly
remember how I received this news, but I do know that Nabokov, for instance,
always had it in for Mann. And in college I thought Nabokov should know, since
he could do anything with prose. Now I have a different view of Nabokov – that his
problem with Mann, or Balzac, or Dostoevsky, arose from the fact that Nabokov
made up a canon for himself and became its prisoner. In this way, he operated,
much like his social realist or psychoanalytic enemies, to squeeze the juice
and joy out of literature. In his best works, I think, Nabokov knows this –
hence his paragons of good taste, his King of Zembla, his Humbert Humbert, are
criminals – in a sense, driven to crime by the same discriminating instinct
that they have cultivated in their souls until it hypertrophied and took over
the plant. One knows, for instance, in
Lolita, that when H.H. enters the Haze household and spots the “banal darling
of the arty middle class, van Gogh’s Arlesienne”, he is not only showing his
lethal sophistication but, in general, his lethality – his lack of perspective
on his superiorities, such as they are. The radical lack of kindness, without
which good taste becomes a very cruel game.

Well, for myself, I am still a Clarkston modernist. I’ve
gone as far away from that little suburban burg (and it has gone away from the
burg I knew in highschool, becoming one of the centers of the Bosnian refugee
influx in America, and now hosting a good number of Somalis, too). But I still kick around in the precinct of
the ideas I had and the artists I admired then. Age has made me think of myself
less as a Joycean exile and more as a sample of a certain history I don’t
understand. In short, a relic puzzled by his own relicness. In that respect, I
am in a Hans Castorp condition – which, pace Levin, is what modernism was all
about.

Monday, April 07, 2014

The annual thumbsuckers inequality ball is going on in the
press. The right, of course, is all at the battlements, decrying envy. Greed is one of those virtuous sins for the
rich, while envy is one of the damned sins that shouldn’t enter the New
Jerusalem. Myself, I’ve always been a big fan of the evil eye. And I don’t even
have the liberal disdain for greed.

But I do have the liberal-left desire to finish the
incomplete task of the French revolution. Equality is up there with liberty on
the roster.

Instead of kicking around abstractions, however, I think we
should start kicking around ratios. How much more income and wealth than that
earned and accrued by the top 20 percentile of income is allowable under the
ideal of egalitarianism?

My sense is that if we take 250,000 dollars as our base (I
am of course speaking of the US), something like 10 times that is as far aw we
can go with inequality of income. Wealth is a trickier subject, but if we put a
cap on 25 million dollars per person, we
have a good inequality space to work with.

Expropriative taxes are a clumsy way to enforce equality. Of
course, the wealthy are always threatening to quit if they aren’t permitted to
make world class booty – but I take those to be the rational cries of the
hopelessly addicted. They should stop working, it would certainly benefit the
rest of us. But besides this, I think
heeding those plutocratic bellows has landed us in a truly nutty variant of
capitalism, with speculation ruling the roost.
This is why deeper and more radical reforms would aim at making the new
york stock exchange, or any exchange, look more like the real economy. For
instance, at the end of the year, the commerce department should tally up
assets and earnings and make sure that the market capitalization of the firm
equals the actual capitalization of the firm.

This would revolutionize Wall Street. Facebook would
immediately shrink to a much lesser company than, say, Caterpillar Tractor. And
so it should – being little more than an internet billboard company on which
companies post ads, it is too ridiculous that Facebook is one of the world’s
huge corporations. The rule of
speculation is intrinsic to the rule of the plutocrats. This is where rugs need
to be pulled.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.